Q&A: NEC elects Devin Grossman as chair

Grossman, a Wharton sophomore, will take over from ?College senior Frank Colleluori

Even the branch of student government responsible for overseeing elections has to choose leaders within its own ranks. Earlier this month, the Nominations and Elections Committee held internal elections to determine the new executive board. Wharton sophomore Devin Grossman was elected chair. The Daily Pennsylvanian sat down with Grossman to discuss his plans for the next year.

Daily Pennsylvanian: What are your major initiatives for
the next year?

Devin Grossman: Every year we go through same
general process in terms of how we run our nominations and elections processes—so it’s definitely about continuing those; that’s really a
sustained mission that we’re always working toward. Additionally, we’re
in charge of general education, which we look at in terms of getting people
involved in student government as a whole and interested in the initiatives
that we’re working on.

DP: Do you have any specific plans for
getting people involved?

DG: First
it’s about increasing general awareness of Penn student government. I think a
lot of people don’t necessarily realize that the same umbrella organization
that plans the Fling concert is also planning things like Hey Day... It’s about creating
more coherent messaging, but also reaching out to groups that don’t traditionally
get involved with student government and aren’t traditionally engaged. Those
are things like cultural, political and religious minorities, but also large
groups of campus that we’re just not targeting, from whom we just don’t see
involvement in terms of people not running for elections, or people just not
being interested in applying to committees. So just in general, I’m hoping to
tap into those communities.

DP: The NEC has standard processes each
year. How are you going to differentiate your chairmanship?

DG: The way we start
is by getting more people involved. I think this year we saw a very diverse
group of candidates, so I think that’s something we definitely want to continue
as far as that relates to the UA elections. I would like to see us move even
more in that direction, and to really improve our outreach so that we get
really competitive races and compelling races from huge disparities across
campus. We want everyone to get involved and feel like there’s someone on student
government or running for student government who represents them and their
interests.

DP: This past election season was pretty
eventful. What were your thoughts going through the process?

DG: Like I was saying, we have a
pretty standard process, so that was no different from any other year. We had a
lot of interesting candidates, which was really exciting because it let more
people get involved. In terms of the results themselves, those are on our
website, and we don’t really have any comments or opinions on those. But I
think overall it was a very interesting election cycle, and we saw that just
with increased interest in everything that was happening.

DP: Are there any specific challenges
facing the NEC over the next year?

DG: I think the first part is that
a lot of people don’t know what the NEC is, or just assume that we’re so bureaucratic
that we’re impossible to reach, when in reality our goal is just the opposite.
We want people to contact us about elections related issues, and we want people
to think they can apply to committees and that committees are relevant to them.

DP: What’s your favorite part of being on
the NEC?

DG: It’s really about being advocates for
students. That’s something we also underplay a bit. Our role is really to get
students involved in everything that is happening on campus—I mean that’s what
we do when we nominate students to committees. We want them to be playing an
active role, and we really fight for students in a sense to make sure they’re
being heard on committees where there a lot of administrators, which can be
very bureaucratic.